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"Can I have more FPS please Bob"

dogbert

dogbert

dogbert

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Joined
28 Feb 2012
Posts
53
Location
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HI All,

I wish to give the big coke-can of Overlockers knowledge a shake and see what bubbles to the surface :cool:

My humble gaming rig is struggling in the FPS and image depth dept. stumbling along at an average 25+ in CoH it runs smoother in STOnline & World Of Tanks but would still benefit from a boost in Graphics Detail.

My Budget is about £200 tops. My last setup was a Watercooled Athlon & ATI Radeon 9600 so I'm no stranger to rebuilding or messing with the bios.

My Current Setup:

MotherBoard - ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe http://uk.asus.com/Motherboards/AMD_AM2/M2N32SLI_DeluxeWireless_Edition/#MSL

2x2GB RAM - KINGSTON NVIDIA SLI Ready PC2-6400 DDR2(800mhz) HyperX memory http://www.kingston.com/us/memory/hyperx/certifications

CPU - AMD Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-phenom-x4-9850-black-edition-review/2

Hard Drive - SATAII 500GB, SAMSUNG - HD502HJ http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2tb-hdd-7200,2430-2.html

Graphics Cards - Two Nvidia 7800GTO in SLI http://www.nvidia.co.uk/page/geforce_7800.html

Software : Windows 7 Ultimate 64Bit
- Company of Hero's
- BioShock
- Quake Enemy Territory
- Total Annihilation
- World of Tanks
- Star-Trek Online

So...anyone with ideas about what would see the best performance upgrade for about £200+? would be most welcome.
 
Every one is going to suggest you get a 7850.

However, for not a lot more you can step up to something with a bit of a bigger leap.

If it was my £200 ish cash, I would look at these:

7850
7870
7950

August may bring an Nvidia GTX 660... maybe worth a look.
 
A 7850 is a good card, but I think there will be a serious bottleneck in your processor. Maybe consider a 6850 and put the rest of the money into upgrading the rest of your computer. As your CPU is about the same / slightly worse than a Pentium G840.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/29?vs=405

You might want to get this thread moved to General Hardware as well.
 
Get what you can of Feepay or wherever for your 7800's and add it to your budget.

Then go for the best your money can get, probably a good non reference cooled 7870, and at a push a 7950.

Will you be overclocking or leaving it at stock?
 
Here to give you an idea:
g840.jpg


Forget about the 7850 recommended above...for the games you mentioned, they are more CPU dependent and uses 1-2 cores, so the Phenom I's poor IPC and low clock is a the biggest drag on the performance.

Seriously guys...you see nothing wrong with pair a 7850 with a slow poke Phenom I CPU...especially on old games, strategy game with lots of units or online games that are more demanding on the CPU side? Both Fire fly and I saw the issue...if the OP have gotten a 7850 with his current CPU, I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't get any noticable performance boost.
 
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Thank you opethdisciple.

Though I don't have a 'personal' preference between the GPU manufacturers, I must mention my BOARD & RAM are very biased towards SLI. Unless my Motherboard supports Crossfire (Which I'm not sure it does?)

Motherboard Chipset is SLI - 2 x PCI Express x16 slot with NVIDIA® SLI™ support, at full x16, x16 speed

I hope to find an Nvidia option to sit on my Nividia Chipset board, is there an earlier model to the GTX 660 that could be recommended for SLI?

Or are new card so much faster that SLI only affects top-end rigs?
 
I dont think his current cpu is that much of a bottleneck guys.

Yes, it is no where near a SB or IV cpu, but it's still got a 2 years in it, unless something drastic happens.

If the op has already oc'ed it then thats his next step, and maybe by a better cooler for it, as well as a GPU.
 
Stick with the Phenom, then wait for Haswell.

Go for the 7850 if you want to stick to the £200 mark, it's the best card for that budget.

It will perform better than your SLi setup, so there's no need to go for more than one card. It will pretty much max almost everything on 1920x1080.
 
WOW - You guys are fast.
I just replied to opethdisciple and there are 4 more posts! - Thanks everyone...
And great idea Marine-RX179. That is a direction I wasn't considering :)
 
dogbert said:
Thank you opethdisciple.

Though I don't have a 'personal' preference between the GPU manufacturers, I must mention my BOARD & RAM are very biased towards SLI. Unless my Motherboard supports Crossfire (Which I'm not sure it does?)

Motherboard Chipset is SLI - 2 x PCI Express x16 slot with NVIDIA® SLI™ support, at full x16, x16 speed

I hope to find an Nvidia option to sit on my Nividia Chipset board, is there an earlier model to the GTX 660 that could be recommended for SLI?

Or are new card so much faster that SLI only affects top-end rigs?
Click to expand...

There is nothing in the £200 of current gen tech from Nvidia. you would have to buy a 500 series card. Something like a GTX 570.

no one knows what price the GTX 660 is going to be, but the rumour is it will be available in August.
 
dogbert said:
WOW - You guys are fast.
I just replied to opethdisciple and there are 4 more posts! - Thanks everyone...
And great idea Marine-RX179. That is a direction I wasn't considering :)
Click to expand...
For that Gigabyte Gen3 H61 motherboard, you will always have the option to upgrade to SandyBridge or IvyBridge i5 (may be 2nd hand) in the future (for example, when people are upgrading from them to new platform/CPU). You wouldn't be able to overclock on that motherboard due to chipset limitation, but it would still be a great performance boost when you upgrade to a Sandy or Ivy i5.

opethdisciple said:
I dont think his current cpu is that much of a bottleneck guys.

Yes, it is no where near a SB or IV cpu, but it's still got a 2 years in it, unless something drastic happens.

If the op has already oc'ed it then thats his next step, and maybe by a better cooler for it, as well as a GPU.
Click to expand...
No overclocking can make a Phenom ONE decent enough for CPU demanding games that uses only 1-2 cores. Its IPC is even worse than Core2, and with my old Q6600 at 3.6GHz which was faster than the Phenom ONE I always got bottlenecked and found myself struggle to get decent GPU usage out of my 5850 while dipping down to low 20s fps in CPU damanding games that use less than 4 cores.

The 6850 should be more than enough to do 50-60+fps for the games his mentioned, while the Phenom ONE does not and will dip frame rate dipping to 30 to 20fps.
 
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Marine-RX179 said:
For that Gigabyte Gen3 H61 motherboard, you will always have the option to upgrade to SandyBridge or IvyBridge i5 (may be 2nd hand) in the future (for example, when people are upgrading from them to new platform/CPU). You wouldn't be able to overclock on that motherboard due to chipset limitation, but it would still be a great performance boost when you upgrade to a Sandy or Ivy i5.


No overclocking can make a Phenom ONE decent enough for CPU demanding games that uses only 1-2 cores. Its IPC is even worse than Core2, and with my old Q6600 at 3.6GHz which was faster than the Phenom ONE I always got bottlenecked and found myself struggle to get decent GPU usage out of my 5850 while dipping down to low 20s fps in CPU damanding games that use less than 4 cores.

The 6850 would be more than enough to do 50-60fps for the games his mention, while the Phenom ONE does not.
Click to expand...

Ok, I though his Phenom was a Phenom 2.
 
OK, Can someone move the thread to General, please?

I have never seen a massive improvement in the strategy games performance from my Overclocked Athlon with a 19" and the Phenom ONE on 22"

I also increased other settings like resolution, image-depth etc, and thought the extra power was used to draw 'bigger','prettier' and more 'detailed' images on my Monitor - LG Flatron M228WD 22in @ 1680 / 1050

My Board Supports Socket AM2+ & DDR2
I think I've got the best CPU for the board?

I chose the board for SLI as this was and still is the percieved bottleneck (FPS) in the games I still play today! (I've played strategy since DUNE on ATARI-ST & RED ALERT on 486PC, so I love a good tactical challenge!)
 
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Let's not forget guys the important fact which has so far been missed -

LG Flatron M228WD 22in @ 1680 / 1050
Click to expand...

Therefore his CPU should be well upto the job if a new monitor is not in the future offing.

Like has been said nothing upto £200 from nvidia is really suitable cept the 5xx cards. Lets not forget a 560ti is still a good card ! Doesn't matter a roo's poo if the 660 is on the horizon and a lot faster gaming at 1680 x 1050 won't make that much difference.

So way I see it is

ATI
7850

Nvidia
560Ti
or wait for a 660.
 
my advice would be go with something like this

YOUR BASKET
1 x msi hd 6850 "dual fan edition" 1024mb gddr5 pci-express graphics card £83.99
1 x intel pentium g840 2.80ghz (sandybridge) socket lga1155 processor - retail £54.95
1 x msi h61m-p31-g3 intel h61 (socket 1155) ddr3 motherboard £38.99
1 x ocuk value 8gb (2x4gb) ddr3 pc3-10666c9 1333mhz low-voltage dual channel kit £29.99
total : £207.91 (includes shipping : free).




the g840 is a fair bit faster than your amd phenom x4 9850 as seen here

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/29?vs=405

and by my reckoning the 6850 is about four times faster than your nv7800's in sli, ive come to this conclusion from here, a ati 4870 is easily three times faster (old charts i know)

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/gaming-graphics-charts-2008-q3/Call-of-Duty-4-v1.6,742.html

and here shows that the 6850 is about a NV7800 sli worth again hence i reckon at least 4 times faster.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/291?vs=304
 
varkanoid said:
Let's not forget guys the important fact which has so far been missed -



Therefore his CPU should be well upto the job if a new monitor is not in the future offing.

Like has been said nothing upto £200 from nvidia is really suitable cept the 5xx cards. Lets not forget a 560ti is still a good card ! Doesn't matter a roo's poo if the 660 is on the horizon and a lot faster gaming at 1680 x 1050 won't make that much difference.

So way I see it is

ATI
7850

Nvidia
560Ti
or wait for a 660.
Click to expand...
Dude you got it the wrong way round. The lower the res, the easier it is to show the short-coming of the CPU. It is at the higher res that CPU's short-coming not as apparent, because of the graphic card's frame rate get dragged down closer to the CPU level (for example, a single GPU card will only do 25-45fps, so a CPU that does 25-45fps or a CPU that does 60-100fps will both still do 25-45fps due to GPU limitation. At lower res when GPU ISN'T the limitation, it's all down to CPU grunt.
 
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